A Lover's Conversation with Depression
by aroseofmanyleaves
Summary: "Because in the last few hours, he had realized something about Depression. That person that was there before was still there, just hidden under layers of self-loathing and ugliness. Depression was like another person, and passed around like the plague, squeezing into an unsuspecting person's body and forcing them out." Adam dispels Isla's demons after a failed suidice attempt.


_This story deals with Depression being like a person and the person with the illness just being like a host body for it. The beginning is confusing, but it gets easier to understand the more you read. Just so everyone knows, I have first-hand experience with what it's like to feel like she does in this story, so please be kind if you choose to review. A one-shot, using two OC's, hopefully the history is eas to figure out._

**A Lover's Conversation with Depression**

His legs are shaking, his knees clipping against one another sporadically as his hands quiver, trembling alongside his lower half, unable to keep his limbs still. He seems to have lost all control over his body, like his neurones have shut down from shock and anxiety, and all the messages going around his body have been scrambled. His eyes are blurry, the colours losing their focus as they all blend together behind the wall of tears building up. He blinks once, and a drop spills over the edge, catching momentarily in his eyelashes and then trailing gently down his stubbled cheek.

He moves his hands from his knees to his face, and drops his head into a little cup that his hands have joined together to form. He closes his eyes, blocks out the world, and lets the remaining tears trickle down his face, unable to stop them or wish them away. He can hear his watch ticking nearby, and every time a second passes, more of him begins to lose hope. _Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick tock…_Time isn't right. The seconds shouldn't go by this quickly, but they begin to match the tempo of his heart. The hours roll by the space of a few minutes. He is blind to the world. He cannot hear the seconds anymore, only the hours. He cannot feel the tears anymore; he is numb. He doesn't taste the blood filling his mouth from where he has unknowingly bitten into his tongue to stop the shaking. The clean, disinfected stench of the hospital has gone away completely.

He looks down at his hands, and the sight of her blood makes him feel physically sick. It takes everything he has in his body to refrain from throwing up, and he lifts his hands from his face, and then grazes his fingertips across his sticky cheeks. He is covered in it. He holds his palms out in front of him, seeing where the blood has seeped into every crack and line, and then he flips his hands over and sees it has become fixed within his fingernails. His eyes widen in fear and horror, and flitter across his pale fingers, running with bright crimson blood, and dripping into his lap. His breathing is erratic and out of sync and he feels his whole system is breaking down. Piece by piece.

"Mister Burlee?" a voice offers loudly and authoritatively, and then he feels his whole left side jolting as said person places a hand on his shoulder and shakes it roughly. He breaks out of his stupor immediately and looks up at the person who has ripped apart his reflection. It is the doctor. And he is scared by the fact that he cannot tell if the news is good or bad. The wrinkles around the doctor's face alter before his expression does, and after a few steady moments, his lips turn upwards into a gradual smile. "She's going to be alright. She's awake; you can speak to her, if you wish."

There is a fraction of a second where he doubts the doctor's words, because, how can she be okay? He carried her in here, having felt no pulse, after watching her swallow an entire bottle containing eighty aspirin tablets. She can't be okay, because she was already dead. But then, that thought it pushed aside, because no one would lie about a thing like this. And the quivering stops suddenly, and his brain returns to normal, and the hours turn back into minutes and seconds. Time passes normally, and his glassy eyes dry out to his normal colour. She's alive. Alive, and able to speak to him. She's alive, and he can hold her again without the destroying fear that she might never wake up again. The nightmares have been stopped before they could start.

He leaps to his feet, the chill he had not felt before disappearing and being replaced by the most soothing warmth. He nods his head at the doctor, mutters a few reminisce words about a thank you, and goes towards the door of her room. He puts a hand on the white door handle, and looks down at his hands. They are perfectly clean, unblemished; he can see his freckles from the sunshine in Africa, and his fingernails are unbelievably normal looking. And suddenly, the relief he felt is gone, and he is angry. She has already destroyed her – he is not going to let her destroy him as well.

He walks calmly over to her bedside, and pulls up the chair silently from across the room, and sits quietly, grasping at her pale hand. He squeezes it tightly within his, clutching to her without the thought of ever letting go, and a small whimper escapes his throat when the squeeze is reciprocated. He looks up at her face, so entirely drained of any hope, and he catches a sob in this throat. She looks so ill. Her cheeks are pale, like an artist has run out of red to colour them in, and her eyes are half-shut, flickering all the time. Her eyelashes seem more prominent now, the titian contrasting more greatly with the pallor of her skin. The bandages he placed last night are still tightly wrapped around her left arm. There are so many wires coming out of her – one attached to a morphine drip, one to the support system, one to the heart rate monitor. And he is so angry.

He takes a deep breath, something he realized he took for granted before now. He looks down at her face, and doesn't see beauty. He sees something repulsive and disgusting. He lets go of her hand, looks down into her unforgiving green eyes, and whispers, "I am so angry with you."

She locks onto his gaze, and, in a trembling and shaking voice, replies, "I'm sorry." There isn't any tone of apology in her words, just the overpowering sound of fear. Whatever it is that she's feeling right now, it isn't feelings of regret for what she has put him through in the last eight hours, it is fear for herself, and what he will say and do to her.

He brushes a strand of her hair behind her ear, making sure to be gentle with her. She deserves the mental pain, but _she_ doesn't deserve it physically. Because her body is still her, whereas her mind is _her_. "You know I've never told you before how much I hate you," he says bitterly, feeling the words dripping off his tongue like venom and watching it slowly envelope her. He sees the confusion on her face, and it pains him slightly to see her hurt because of something he has said, but then he remembers that it's not her. Not right now.

"Ouch," she replies, letting out a little, painful laugh. There's some humour in that statement, and it makes his heart flutter strangely because it feels like how it used to. But she thinks he's joking, and he's not ever going to rest until she realizes how deadly serious he is.

He prepares himself for what he's about to say, because if he gets even a single word of this wrong, then this destroys everything. He needs to shatter the right person, and if he hurts the other, then her life really is over, and then, by extension, so is his.

"No, I really do. I despise you," he begins, and he drops her hand back onto the bed, staring down at her the whole time, "I hate you because you tried to jump out of our bedroom window before. You got blood stains over the carpet and the sheets. You are so selfish, all the time, all you think about is yourself."

She looks hurt, and confused, but he knows better. He glares at her furiously, and she seems to stiffen up, and then the helpless puppy-dog looks seems to disappear and she replies hastily, defending herself, "That's the only reason I'm still alive." And that hurts, because it's drawing on past memories that he had with her, and using them against him. Guilt surges through his system at that phrase, and he remembers a time nearly twelve years ago when she said it last.

_He ordered everyone to be quiet, but the students were still talking, yelling and gossiping across the classroom and throwing paper-aeroplanes and God knows what else. He stands awkwardly in front of the room, feeling the students' respect for him fading with every passing second. He scans the room helplessly, wondering how he's going to stop them all talking, when he sees her at the back of the classroom, her mouth shut and her eyes fixed on him. Eventually, he regains the class' interests, and makes his point of how sixth formers should behave more appropriately, but as everyone leaves forty minutes later, he asks her to stay behind._

"_Isla, you were being completely silent whilst everyone else was talking," he states bluntly, and she allows herself to capture a smile. At eighteen years old, he thinks her smile could power a whole city better than a tonne of electricity, but he really shouldn't be thinking about her like that. She confirms his statement though, and nods her head for him to continue._

"_Why didn't you try and help me get everyone else to be quiet?" he asked curiously, and a question of moral judgement seemed to pass into the conversation. But instead of answering his question, she throws her head back and laughs sweetly, and then slaps a hand to her cheek and giggles in front of him. She doesn't acknowledge his look of frustration and irritation. "I generally tend to just worry about myself," she replied seriously, her smile beginning to fade, "that's the only reason that I'm still alive. Anyway it's your job to shut them all up."_

_She stands, and grabs her bag, and walks towards the door, and is just exiting when he comes to his senses. "Isla, what do you mean 'only reason I'm still alive'?" She looks at great unease with herself, and the blood seems to drain instantly out of her cheeks. He sees her right hand flit across her body to subconsciously grip her left forearm, and he misses what she is trying to hide. _

"_Now, now Sir – I'm pretty sure someone as clever as you can work that out."_

The memory hits him like a crowbar in the face, and it hurts somehow to think of her being taken over like this before, when he couldn't help her. But he spoke to her that day, and he intends to set the record straight with her now. "No, you're selfish, and you hurt me constantly. You make everything in my life seem so pointless, you make me question what the point of me being in your life even is if I can't even help you with this," he rants furiously, standing up and pacing about the room, swiping his fringe away with his hand to find it fall back into place almost immediately, "I hate that you let me think you were okay, and then played me and made me watch you try to kill yourself. I hate you because you didn't trust me enough to save you." At this point, his voice cracks right down the middle, and he almost stops. He does momentarily, to catch himself, and wipes away tears from his face with the back of his palm. There is one more thing that he has to make clear though, "And the thing I hate the most is that you only cry when no one is watching."

All through his list and explanation, she seemed to keep a cool demeanour, something he had been expecting. When he finished up, feeling more desperate and despairing at this conversation, she drily responded with a meagre, "I cried in front of you last night."

It was at this point that he sat back down in his seat, and breathed heavily. It was at this point that he realized everything would begin to make sense. "Yes, you did, but Isla didn't."

"Excuse me?" she asked, shocked by the mere suggestion that was being implicated by his choice of words. He smiled grimly at her, and the pieces began to be painted, making it easier for him to begin to assemble them. Because in the last few hours, he had realized something about Depression. Even though he had never suffered form it personally, he knew it changed a person considerably, and altered their entire character and personality. But that person who was there before was still there, just hidden under layers of self-loathing and ugliness. Depression was like another person, and passed around like the plague, squeezing into an unsuspecting person's body and forcing them out. But Isla was so strong that a bit of her still remained. And it was his duty to retrieve her. He was yelling at Depression, and was bound by his love to scare her away completely.

"No, I'm not talking to Isla; I'm saying what I hate about _you_," he explained clearly, gaining more confidence with every word that he spoke. She shifted in the bed, and gripped the sides of the mattress. She wasn't going down without a fight.

"Apart from the last thing, all of this is what I hate about you. I love my Isla, you see, I could only hate one thing about her," he began heatedly, stomping around the room to emphasize his words. He yanked the cord on the window and the blind came tumbling down, and he locked the door, so neither of them could get out.

"She's beautiful, and clever and sarcastic. She's witty, and she is the only person in the world I could love so much," his voice shook magnificently here, and he could feel that stinging sensation in his eyes when tears began to build, "I love it when she asks for one more sugar in her tea even though she already has three. I love her hair when she climbs out of bed and it looks like she's been through a jungle. I love her pale, unblemished skin, apart from those four scars you caused."

_It was only a few minutes after she left that he figured out what her right hand had been covering? How could be have been so stupid? She was a lovely, happy girl, but whenever he caught himself looking at her, and she was by herself, she looked so sad. Being selfish, and looking out for herself, was the only reason she hadn't killed herself. He dropped his pen onto the floor, letting the ink seep into the carpet, and he sobbed for Isla Emmitt. _

He was beginning to tear through her now, like he was engaged in a deadly sword-fight with her, and he needed one more strike to break her completely. His voice raised to a shout, and with tears dripping from his chin to the floor, he raised his hand and pointed furiously at her, lying, looking so damn innocent in the hospital bed, and shouted, "I love how even though her independence rules, she still wants me. I love Isla Christiana Julia Pearce, and she belongs to me and not you, and you can't have her! She's mine, and you are not welcome here tonight." With that, he gave a grand sweeping gesture, and waved his hand mercilessly towards the door.

He breathed out heavily, and saw something twitch inside her, and before he could sit back down again, she yelled back, "I love her too! I've loved her longer than you."

The injustice and lies enveloped in her words made his blood boil. He looked at her fixedly, but instead of showing his anger, he calmed and let his expression slide seamlessly into one of sheer disappointment. "No, you don't love her at all, you tried to make her kill herself. She was happy, and you made her so sad."

"I made her sad?" There was a childlike innocence in the question, and when he looked deep at her, he could see she was crying. He made Depression cry. He wondered if anyone had ever managed to do that before; if anyone had ever succeeded in making sadness sad.

"Yes."

The last thing Depression ever said to him surprised him the most, "I'm sorry." And before he could look up, she was gone, hopefully for the last time. Only Isla remained, and after that inane battle, she looked like she was just waking up. Her head hit the pillow, and there was silence in the room. He unlocked the door, and opened up the blind, and then saw the bright sunlight that was hidden behind it. He felt exhausted, drained of energy, like he had just performed an exorcism. And he sort of had. He felt ridiculous now, having shouted at a thing which didn't wholly exist as a physical form, but he was sure it was gone now.

He went to get tea from the cafeteria. When he got back, Isla was awake, and although she didn't look healthy, the ugliness that had been covering her had been washed away. She was herself again. She looked directly at him, and motioned for him to sit down next to her. He obliged, and handed her the tea. She asked how many sugars. He answered three. She asked for another one. He merely chuckled. Without warning, she wrapped her arms around him and pulled him into an enormous embrace, holding him close to her. He reciprocated her actions, holding her tightly, making sure she couldn't fall without him.

"I love you," Isla whispered faintly, "I love you. I love you, I love you. I'm so sorry."

"It's okay," he muttered back into her shoulder, brushing her hair through his fingers, "It wasn't your fault. It's all going to be alright."


End file.
